Did you hear the one about the Smithsonian hiding the bones of Bible giants in the basement? No? Well, Missouri Republican Representative Eric Burlinson did, and he recently said he wants to develop a “strategy” to use Congress’s investigative power to get to the bottom of the mystery. “I do believe [giants] were real,” Burlinson told a Blaze TV program in June, shortly before he gave a speech at NephCon 2025, a gathering of people who are hunting the remains of the Nephilim, or the giants from the Book of Genesis.
Burlinson’s comments on Prime Time With Alex Stein were delivered with laughter, but his attendance at a Nephilim conference was not exactly funny. It came only weeks before the Trump administration sent a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian demanding a full review to ensure museum exhibits and curatorial processes conform to the president’s vision of history.
With the president declaring the Smithsonian “out of control” on Truth Social, the shape and scope of the growing threat to America’s premier public museum from the right wing is rapidly coming into view. And that shape is increasingly that of an internet fever dream of conspiracy, one that has been fomenting distrust of the Smithsonian for decades in service of a deeply conservative and religious agenda that sees both history and science as its ideological enemies.
For most of the nation’s history, the Smithsonian has served as symbol of national unity, receiving praise from members of both political parties and the public at large. Intermittent efforts to challenge the museum, such as Christian radio host Dale Crowley Jr.’s 1978 federal lawsuit demanding the Smithsonian cancel an exhibition on human evolution, have largely failed to materialize. That all changed in 1994, when veterans’ groups and conservative politicians, including Patrick J. Buchanan, vocally criticized the National Air and Space Museum for highlighting the Japanese casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in a proposed exhibit tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the Enola Gay. They considered any questioning of the decision to drop the A-bomb as dishonoring veterans, and thus anti-American. It was, in Buchanan’s words, “a sleepless campaign to inculcate in American youth a revulsion toward America’s past.”
“We’ve got to get patriotism back in the Smithsonian,” conservative Texas Congressman Sam Johnson said, on being appointed to the museum’s Board of Regents shortly afterward to provide so-called ideological “balance.” “We want the Smithsonian to reflect real America and not something that a historian dreamed up.”
The year-long media and political firestorm, and the attacks on historians as unpatriotic fantasists, helped fuel the politicization of the Smithsonian, but they did so in tandem with a development occurring on the nascent internet.
A year before the Enola Gay controversy, in 1993, future Ancient Aliens star David Childress, then a self-described “world explorer,” introduced the world to his new conspiracy theory, that the Smithsonian was actively trying to suppress the “truth” about various lost races of white giants, ancient Egyptians, and assorted what-have-you that allegedly occupied prehistoric America. He wrote about this in his self-published magazine, World Explorer, and in the New Age Nexus New Times that year. He dubbed the conspiracy with the not-so-original moniker “Smithsonian Gate.”
Childress gathered a passel of unconvincing evidence and wrapped it up in a sort of homage to the 1981 Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, whose final scene showed the U.S. government secreting away the fabled Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse, never to be seen again. “To those who investigate allegations of archaeological cover-ups,” he wrote, “there are disturbing indications that the most important archaeological institute in the United States, the Smithsonian Institute [sic], an independent federal agency, has been actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important archaeological discoveries made in the Americas.”
Childress’s evidence was about as solid as Indy’s celluloid adventures. Childress pronounced a 1909 newspaper hoax about an underground Tibetan city in the Grand Canyon true. He berated the Smithsonian for discrediting 32,000 ceramic statues, including some of people having sex with dinosaurs, because he assumed the modern fakes were ancient and proved evolution a lie. He heard a secondhand story about the Smithsonian dumping a barge of “unusual” artifacts into the Atlantic to stop anyone from seeing them. (Possibly this was a garbled version of the allegation, apparently dating to the 1990s, that the American Museum of Natural History dumped unwanted mammoth bones into the East River in 1949.) The list goes on.
The most important part of Childress’s conspiracy, though, was the specific claim that John Wesley Powell, the director of the Smithsonian in the late 1800s, orchestrated a cover-up of evidence for giants who were part of a lost race that had been in contact with Europe and built pyramids and mounds across America. The most spectacular of these mounds, Monk’s Mound at Cahokia near St. Louis, has a base as large as the Great Pyramid at Giza’s.
Powell wanted to disprove the popular notion that Native Americans erected these mounds, on the grounds that they were too stupid and lazy to create these features—something that nineteenth-century scholars assumed only white people or Bible giants could do. Childress implied that Powell suppressed the truth because he was too sympathetic to Native Americans and had chosen to improperly aggrandize their cultures by suppressing evidence of (imaginary) ancient European colonists that would have connected ancient America to the country’s current Caucasian population. He called this the Smithsonian’s “official dogma.”
Childress relied on Victorian reports about large bones that Powell’s team, led by Cyrus Thomas, had dismissed in 1894 as unevidenced. Hundreds of such reports littered the papers in the late 1800s, and claiming to find the bones of giants became a popular appeal to “prove” the Bible’s superiority to Darwin. The Smithsonian politely informed inquirers that these bones did not belong to the mythical Nephilim.
We know, of course, what those bones really were. As the onetime head of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, Ales Hrdlička, told Science News Letter in 1934, the so-called bones of “giants” the public sent to the Smithsonian for review fell into three categories: those measured incorrectly, those misunderstood due to ignorance of anatomy, and those belonging to mastodons and mammoths. When they arrived at the museum, they were correctly classified, and thus the bones of “giants” vanished into the catalogs of normal human bones and normal animal bones.
Twentieth-century evangelicals and creationists had long cited sensational newspaper stories of giant bones as proof of the Bible’s inerrancy, but even the most famous creationist book on the subject, Charles DeLoach’s 1995 work Giants: A Reference Guide From History, the Bible, and Recorded Legend, did not blame the Smithsonian for hiding the bones.
However, in the early 2000s, the creationist thread quickly wrapped itself around the needle of growing conservative anger at the Smithsonian’s perceived politics. Intermittent attacks on the Smithsonian over everything from evolution and environmental conservation to sweatshops (the apparel industry was offended) may have been forgotten, but the conspiracy about ancient giants elevated the same concerns to the level of myth and made them an article of faith.
Influential conspiracy theorist David Icke picked up Childress’s story for his 1993 book The Biggest Secret, but the reprint shared on the (now defunct) KeeleyNet paranormal bulletin board in 1993 spread Childress’s claims across the internet. Then, in 2001, a writer names Ross Hamilton produced an article in Nexus called “Holocaust of Giants: The Great Smithsonian Cover-Up,” expanding on Childress’s claim and linking it explicitly to conservative evangelical Christianity. Hamilton argued that the Smithsonian suppressed evidence of Bible giants not just to help Native Americans but to keep Christians from realizing that “Darwin’s troublesome theory” was false.
Hamilton’s article, often paired with Childress’s, crashed into a burgeoning alternative history media revolution that revolved, ultimately, around grievances against government, science, and “elite” academics who questioned jingoist renditions of the past. Whether it was popular books of fringe history that sought “white” gods in ancient America or cable TV documentaries looking for prehistoric Europeans who ruled ancient America, the overarching theme was a longing to return to an imagined past when a rapidly diversifying United States was still mostly white and Christian.
A lost white race of Bible giants—literally bigger, stronger, and whiter than everyone else—fashioned as a symbol of everything conservatives wanted to remake America into, is an all-too-convenient bit of lore for the conspiracy-besotted right. (Never mind that the Nephilim were technically the villains in Genesis!) And the Smithsonian was, if anything, a useful foil for a fringe movement looking for an enemy to accuse of suppressing the truth.
Soon enough, claims that the Smithsonian intentionally hid the bones of Bible giants went mainstream, presaging the country’s own rightward shift. By the 2010s, the Smithsonian’s secret giants appeared in popular paranormal books, on late-night radio shows, in multiple cable TV documentaries (including at least two separate History Channel shows), and across a network of evangelical and far-right media outlets.
Among the most popular of these were the Christian DVDs and later podcasts produced by Steve Quayle and his Nephilim-hunting partner, Timothy Alberino. Quayle, an archconservative, blamed Bible giants for “teaching” men to be gay. He and Alberino were regulars on the right-wing podcast circuit in the 2010s, often appearing with figures like Alex Jones and Jim Bakker so Quayle could hawk their merch, attack Democratic politicians as demonic, and advocate for a targeted genocide of Nephilim-controlled liberals.
Burlinson told Blaze TV that he had been radicalized against the Smithsonian through Alberino’s podcasts and videos. In his podcasts, Alberino has described Bible giants as a “superior race society.”
In recent years, Alberino has made moves to go more mainstream. He has appeared on Ancient Aliens, the History Channel show advocating historical conspiracies, where David Childress is a featured star. That same show also hosted Tucker Carlson, Tennessee Republican Representative Tim Burchett, and others to peddle conspiracies about government cover-ups of space aliens, interdimensional beings, demons, and more.
For the far right, the E.T.s of Ancient Aliens—the same ones Congress is currently hunting in various UFO hearings—are actually angels and demons, and those demons are the souls of the giants who died in the Flood, according to a nonbiblical text Alberino endorses. Burlinson said in 2023 that he thinks UFOs could be angels, and more recently he promised that a congressional UFO hearing to be held on September 9 would feature witnesses who “handled the bodies” of these beings.
Conspiracies about Bible giants are basically the Christian version of UFOs and aliens, and it’s no wonder there is significant cross-pollination between believers in the two camps, even in Congress, where several representatives like Burlinson and Burchett have publicly discussed their belief in both. In fact, both conspiracies give pride of place to the Nephilim narrative from Genesis 6:4 as proof of either fallen angels or alien intervention.
It would be laughable if the Smithsonian conspiracy theory and tales of Bible giants now being spread on Blaze TV, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and across right-wing media, were not a kind of Trojan horse to soften up the public to accept political propaganda in place of history and complete the assault on America’s museums that failed in the 1990s. But the conspiracists continue to spread their lore, and mainstream conservative politicians continue to escalate their attacks on the Smithsonian—a far-right pincer movement directed at an institution that is both the nation’s premier repository of historical fact and a potent bolsterer of America’s civic fabric. And that is no laughing matter.
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